Some daughters can talk about anything with their moms. For others, it would be blasphemous to discuss something such as sex.
Author Joyce McFadden says talking about sex and sexuality gets easier over time if mothers and daughters discuss it early on. The awkwardness, she says, sets in when the conversation starts too late in life.
McFadden, who is married with a daughter who just turned 15, recently released her latest book, "Your Daughter's Bedroom: Insights for Raising Confident Women" (Palgrave Macmillan, $25). In it, she interviews women ages 18 to 105 who share what they learned about sex from their mothers and others.
"In my practice, I was always sort of sad that women would talk about very similar things, and there would be this feeling of shame and guilt attached to it," says McFadden, a certified psychoanalyst. "I wrote the book to let them know there's a community of women that feel the same way. There's a sense of belonging in that, and that's what I wanted to target."
Question: What are some things mothers can do early on to ease the awkwardness that can come if they wait to talk with their daughters about sex?
Answer: We need to start talking to our girls when they're toddlers, using accurate names for their body parts. If she knows what her earlobe is, she can know what her vulva is. To them, it's just part of their bodies. It also establishes a foundation, and we can slowly add things as our girls grow from toddlerhood until adulthood. The problem is we wait until they're teenagers, and of course, that's the time when it's awkward because that's when they start to separate from us - as they need to do to develop. Because we haven't established it as a normal part of dialogue, it comes out of left field.
Q: What should mothers with teenage daughters be talking about right now?
A: I think being clear on what safe sex practices are is important. If it's my job to teach her about drunk driving, then it's also my parental responsibility to teach her how to keep herself safe from disease and infection. It shouldn't matter that one is sexual, and one is not.
Q: At what point does a conversation about sex and sexuality become inappropriate or even abnormal for a mother and daughter?
A: There are boundaries we shouldn't cross, but we tend to go too far in that and not cross any boundaries and worry that it's all inappropriate. Our daughters don't want to know what sexual positions we like. It creeps them out. They want to know if couples last, how does someone recover from rape, why do women choose the husbands they choose and how we live with our sexuality with broad strokes.
